EnnyWare by Vortx: An Exercise in E-Commerce and Marketing for a Mug with a Blue Dot

EnnyWare is the latest, and perhaps the best, incarnation of the trusty ASPDotNetStoreFront shopping cart. Vortx, the parent company of the e-commerce platform, has created a relatively intuitive interface to allow even my wife to add products, customize a home page, add a logo and figure out how to jazz up the built-in mobile version of a site.

My motive in involving Shelly in EnnyWare was twofold. I wanted her to know what I did all day which included coding, marketing and optimizing pages for customers to find the products they want. I also wanted her to experience at least a small portion of the pain. Shelly can easily navigate the pitfalls of Facebook, set up international chat lines with Android apps, navigate websites and ask me for help when a site becomes non-responsive. She refuses to learn the basics of pinging or grepping (for the old schoolers out there), but she can gripe about a non-intuitive interface.

For Vortx’s upcoming annual conference in Denver, participants were asked to pick a store name, configure an online store, add products, and market the products using EnnyWare’s built-in marketing channels. EnnyWare’s connectors include (at the time of this post): Amazon, Google, Bing, PriceGrabber, Shopping.com, ShopZilla, and the Find.

My assignment, as a participant in the annual workshop, was to take a plain white coffee cup and practice selling it using EnnyWare. I admit I had a few years of practice with ASPDotNetStoreFront, whose core engines are powering EnnyWare. And I wish every store setup were as easy as EnnyWare. The platform doesn’t do everything for you. There’s legwork required, such as signing up for a Google webmaster’s account, verifying the site, and doing the same with all the other marketing channels EnnyWare offers. And then some.

I believe strongly in product photography and capturing a single product’s multiple uses. A white coffee cup or mug can be a pencil holder, a cappuccino bowl, a candy “jar,” a hot chocolate or hot cocoa mug, and even a planter or a flower pot. Sure, a pencil holder might be a bit of a reach, but how many of you have used a cup as a pencil holder? I have. This cup though, as you can see below, is a bit wide for that purpose. So I’d not market it as a pen and pencil holder.

I asked Shelly what she would use a cup or a mug for. We settled on four uses: a coffee mug, a tea cup, a hot cocoa mug and a tinky planter, if you want to showcase your gardening skills or promote the diversity of weeds in your backyard.

Let us know what you think. EnnyWare is still in its incipient stage, but it seems to hold promise. Would you market it the same way we did?